This document is the first printed version of the American Declaration of Independence. On June 7, 1776, Richard Henry Lee of Virginia introduced a resolution urging Congress, meeting in Philadelphia, to declare independence from Great Britain. Four days later, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Roger Sherman, and Robert R. Livingston were appointed as a committee to draft a declaration of independence. The committee’s draft was read in Congress on June 28. On July 4, Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence, containing a list of grievances against the British ...

Because the territory of present-day Belarus was part of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth and, since the end of the 18th century, part of the Russian Empire, the history of the mapping of the Belarusian lands is closely connected with the development of cartography in Western Europe and in Russia. Józef Aleksander Jabłonowski, governor of the town of Novogrudok (present-day Belarus), was an avid collector of cartographic works. Under Jabłonowski’s supervision and with his financial support, the Italian cartographer Giovanni Antonio Rizzi-Zannoni created the ...

This short work, entitled Kitāb al-yawāqīt fī ma‘rifat al-mawāqīt, and copied by an anonymous scribe in Shawwāl in June-July 1775 (AH 1168), is attributed to Ḥusayn (or Ḥasan) b. Zayd b. ‘Alī al-Jaḥḥāf, who is said to have dedicated it to Abū ‘Alī Manṣūr al-Ḥākim bi Amr-Allāh, the sixth Fāṭimid ruler (died 996). The manuscript lists the 12 months of the year, each on one sheet, in the form of an almanac. The last page is a one-page guide to the interpretation of dreams, reportedly prepared at the behest ...

This manuscript opens with the 20 letters “to the sons who follow his [Anthony’s] gentle path…and prayers to keep us from Satan’s example.” The letters are for the most part short, many not exceeding five folios. According to an introductory note, they are addressed to both men and women. The work is in a bold but relaxed hand. Each letter or other significant section is set off in red. There are no contemporary marginal glosses, but comments and corrections (some in English) in pencil were made by ...

This pamphlet is Thomas Jefferson’s personal copy of A Summary View of the Rights of British America, which he originally drafted in July 1774 as a set of instructions for the Virginia delegates to the first Continental Congress. Jefferson argued that the British Parliament had no rights to govern the colonies, which he claimed had been independent since their founding. He also described the usurpations of power and deviations from law committed by King George III and Parliament. Jefferson was not present in the Virginia House when his draft ...

The long subtitle of this Latin map of northern Greece explains that it depicts “the provinces of Macedonia, Thessaly, and Albania, in the last one of which the dwellings of the Montenegrin people located in the county of Zenta are indicated, together with the neighboring regions and islands, drawn by very recent and new auxiliary troops according to the rule of correct projections in use in the current war.” In 1770, when the map was published, these lands were all part of the Ottoman Empire. Zenta, or Zeta, refers to ...

Seirō Bijin Awase (Beauties of Yoshiwara) is one of the finest multicolored woodblock printed books in Japan. It was published in 1770. The book depicts 166 courtesans of the Yoshiwara, the pleasure quarter in Edo (present-day Tokyo), with the names of the courtesans and the brothels where they worked, with a haiku (a short poem) in the background of each illustration. The work consists of five sections in five chapters. The original title slip on which the book title and the volume title were printed is attached to the center ...

Shuo wen jie zi (Explaining and analyzing characters), often abridged as Shuo wen, was compiled by Xu Shen (circa 58−circa 147), a Confucian scholar and linguist of the Eastern Han dynasty. This is the first Chinese dictionary to use the principle of organization by sections with shared components, called bu shou (radicals), and to analyze the form, meaning, and pronunciation of each character, using the liu shu (six categories of Chinese characters) theory, to give the rationale behind them, as well as their interrelation. It is the forerunner of ...

Passionale Domini Venerabilis Conventvs Solnensis (Passional of the venerable lord for the Convent of Žilina), commonly known as the Passional of Žilina, contains a number of manuscript musical works. Included here are two compendia. In the first, Harmonia pastoralis (Shepherd's harmony), are two Latin-Slovak Christmas masses with Slovak folk pastorales and carols, and the Latin antiphon "Tota pulchra" (All beautiful). In the second, Prosae pastorales (Pastor's songs), are carols and pastorales for Christmas, New Year, and Epiphany, including the well-known carol “Do lesa, do hory valasi” (Into the ...

In Boston in the late 1760s, the stirrings of what became the American Revolution began as residents grew angry about the heavy taxation to which they were subjected. With the Townshend Acts of 1767, the British placed taxes on imported goods, including glass, lead, paint, paper, and tea. To enforce the acts, they imposed a heavy military presence on the Massachusetts colonists that exacerbated tensions between the local populace and representatives of the crown. On March 5, 1770, British sentries guarding the Boston Customs House were surrounded by jeering Bostonians ...

This two-volume work is the third edition of a book first published as a single volume in 1757, expanded to two volumes in 1766, and republished in 1772. The author, John Henry Grose (active 1750-83), was born in England and went to Bombay (present-day Mumbai) in March 1750, to work as a servant and writer for the British East India Company. The book contains Grose’s descriptions of 18th-century India, including his account of the war of 1756-63, in which the British East India Company largely eliminated France as a ...

Thomas Jefferys (1710-71) was a royal geographer to King George III and a London publisher of maps. He is well known for his maps of North America, produced to meet commercial demand, but also to support British territorial claims against the French. The period from 1748-63 saw fierce global competition between England and France, culminating in the Seven Years' War, which produced a high demand for maps of the contested territories. This map presents Nova Scotia and Cape Breton Island in the wake of the “great upheaval,” when the British ...

France and Britain vied for control of Dominica for many years. In 1763, the British gained possession of the island. This detailed map shows British-owned estates and a plantation on the Atlantic side of the island. Details on the map include individual buildings and structures, roads, sections of the plantation identified by number, administrative divisions of the estates identified by letters, streams, pictorial representations of vegetation and relief, the coastline and coastal features, and a vignette of ships in the harbor. The map also includes a keyed legend listing the ...

Following France’s defeat in the Seven Years' War (1756-63), Louis-Antoine de Bougainville (1729-1811), a soldier with a distinguished military record in Canada, received permission from King Louis XV to undertake France’s first major geographical exploration of the Pacific. In 1766-69 Bougainville became the first Frenchman to circumnavigate the globe. His voyage, meticulously recounted in this book, resulted in several significant scientific contributions, including establishing the precise location of a number of Pacific islands and determining the width of the Pacific Ocean. However, it was Bougainville’s observations of ...

On July 4, 1776, the Second Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence, in which the American colonies set forth a list of grievances against the British Crown and declared that they were breaking from British rule to form free and independent states. On July 19, 1776, Congress resolved that the Declaration passed on the 4th be "fairly engrossed on parchment with the title and stile [sic]: 'The unanimous declaration of the thirteen United States of America'...and that the same, when engrossed, be signed by every member of Congress ...

John Dunlap, official printer to the Continental Congress, produced the first printed versions of the American Declaration of Independence in his Philadelphia shop on the night of July 4, 1776. After the Declaration had been adopted by the Congress earlier that day, a committee took the manuscript document, possibly Thomas Jefferson's "fair copy" of his rough draft, to Dunlap for printing. On the morning of July 5, copies were dispatched by members of Congress to various assemblies, conventions, and committees of safety as well as to the commanders of ...

This Arabic manuscript, dated 1775, is a collection of the sayings of Muhammad by the scholar as-Sagani (died 1252), who was born in India and served as a diplomatic representative of the caliph an-Nasirbillah to India. The traditions are arranged according to grammatical rules. The manuscript is from the Bašagić Collection of Islamic Manuscripts in the University Library of Bratislava, Slovakia, which was inscribed on the UNESCO Memory of the World register in 1997. Safvet beg Bašagić (1870-1934) was a Bosnian scholar, poet, journalist, and museum director who assembled a ...

This manuscript is an Arabic translation of the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius of Loyola. At the beginning of the manuscript, Ignatius (1491–1556) is expressly described as the founder of “Jesuit monasticism.” The text also states that this work was translated from Latin into Arabic in the Phoenician city of Sidon, in the year 1731 by the Jesuit Pierre Fromage (1678–1740). The translation was for the benefit of those in Eastern countries, as it was known that many in Western countries had benefited from the Latin version of the ...

This manuscript is an 18th-century copy of Nuzhat al-ḥisāb (The excursion of calculus)by mathematician Aḥmad ibn Muḥammad al-Farāḍī ibn al-Hā'im (around 1356–1412). The copyist of this brief but densely written codex provided his name and the date of the completion of his work in the colophon: at the bottom of the last page of the manuscript is stated that Aḥmad ibn Qāsim ibn Aḥmad ibn Muḥammad al-Hanbalī finished this copy in the year 1185 AH (1772). The Nuzhat al-ḥisābis an abridgment by Ibn al-Hā'im of ...

The term ukiyo-e, literally “pictures of the floating world,” refers to a genre of Japanese artwork that flourished in the Edo period (1600–1868). As the phrase “floating world” suggests, with its roots in the ephemeral worldview of Buddhism, ukiyo-e captured the fleeting dynamics of contemporary urban life. While being accessible and catering to “common” tastes, the artistic and technical details of these prints show remarkable sophistication, their subjects ranging from portraits of courtesans and actors to classical literature. Utagawa Toyoharu (1735–1814) was the founder of the Utagawa school ...

The term ukiyo-e, literally “pictures of the floating world,” refers to a genre of Japanese artwork that flourished in the Edo period (1600–1868). As the phrase “floating world” suggests, with its roots in the ephemeral worldview of Buddhism, ukiyo-e captured the fleeting dynamics of contemporary urban life. While being accessible and catering to “common” tastes, the artistic and technical details of these prints show remarkable sophistication, their subjects ranging from portraits of courtesans and actors to classical literature. Shunshō (1726–93) was a leading artist of the Katsukawa school ...

The term ukiyo-e, literally “pictures of the floating world,” refers to a genre of Japanese artwork that flourished in the Edo period (1600–1868). As the phrase “floating world” suggests, with its roots in the ephemeral worldview of Buddhism, ukiyo-e captured the fleeting dynamics of contemporary urban life. While being accessible and catering to “common” tastes, the artistic and technical details of these prints show remarkable sophistication, their subjects ranging from portraits of courtesans and actors to classical literature. Shunshō (1726–93) was a leading artist of the Katsukawa school ...

The term ukiyo-e, literally “pictures of the floating world,” refers to a genre of Japanese artwork that flourished in the Edo period (1600–1868). As the phrase “floating world” suggests, with its roots in the ephemeral worldview of Buddhism, ukiyo-e captured the fleeting dynamics of contemporary urban life. While being accessible and catering to “common” tastes, the artistic and technical details of these prints show remarkable sophistication, their subjects ranging from portraits of courtesans and actors to classical literature. Shunshō (1726–93) was a leading artist of the Katsukawa school ...

This late-18th century Spanish manuscript map depicts Port Louis and vicinity on the island of Mauritius in the Indian Ocean. The map is oriented with southeast at the top. It shows the coastline, coastal features, soundings, anchorages, fortifications, a battery, windmill, hospital, storehouse, and the port. It also includes a keyed legend. The map is part of the Library of Congress’s collection from the Real Escuela de Navegación, Cadiz, Spain, purchased from Maggs Brothers, London. Arab and Malay sailors knew of Mauritius as early as the 10th century. The ...

This 1770 Spanish manuscript map depicts the Cape of Good Hope at the southern tip of the continent of Africa. The map shows the coastline, coastal features, soundings, anchorages, a settlement, and a pictorial representation of a ship. It is oriented with east at the top. A note on the map indicates that Cape Town was inhabited by the Dutch, and that the map is a copy of a 1765 original prepared by a frigate of the British East India Company, whose officers allowed a copy to be made in ...

This map is one of four manuscript charts from the first great voyage of exploration by Captain James Cook, which in April 1770 made the first clear delineation of the east coast of Australia. Sponsored by the Royal Society and the Royal Navy, the expedition had several objectives. Cook was to observe and describe the transit of Venus, chart the coastlines of places he visited in the South Pacific, and record details of the peoples, flora, and fauna he saw. The expedition sponsors also hoped Cook would find and claim ...

This map is one of four manuscript charts from the first great voyage of exploration by Captain James Cook, which in April 1770 made the first clear delineation of the east coast of Australia. Sponsored by the Royal Society and the Royal Navy, the expedition had several objectives. Cook was to observe and describe the transit of Venus, chart the coastlines of places he visited in the South Pacific, and record details of the peoples, flora, and fauna he saw. The expedition sponsors also hoped Cook would find and claim ...

This map is one of four manuscript charts from the first great voyage of exploration by Captain James Cook, which in April 1770 made the first clear delineation of the east coast of Australia. Sponsored by the Royal Society and the Royal Navy, the expedition had several objectives. Cook was to observe and describe the transit of Venus, chart the coastlines of places he visited in the South Pacific, and record details of the peoples, flora, and fauna he saw. The expedition sponsors also hoped Cook would find and claim ...

This map is one of four manuscript charts from the first great voyage of exploration by Captain James Cook, which in April 1770 made the first clear delineation of the east coast of Australia. Sponsored by the Royal Society and the Royal Navy, the expedition had several objectives. Cook was to observe and describe the transit of Venus, chart the coastlines of places he visited in the South Pacific, and record details of the peoples, flora, and fauna he saw. The expedition sponsors also hoped Cook would find and claim ...

This late 18th-century Latin map of the world by the Augsburg map publisher Tobias Lotter (1717-77) is based on an earlier map by the French cartographer Guillaume de l'Isle (1675-1726). De l'Isle was among the group of French cartographers who wrested mapmaking preeminence from the Dutch in the late 17th century. De l’Isle was a child prodigy, having drawn his first map at age nine. He was trained in history and geography, as well as in mathematics and astronomy. He drew extensively on classical Arabic and Persian ...

The “Battle Copper Prints” are a series of prints from copper engravings dating from the second half of the 18th century. They were commissioned by the Qianlong emperor of the Qing dynasty (1644–1911), who ruled from 1735 to 1796. They depict his military campaigns in China’s inner provinces and along the country’s frontiers. The master illustrations for the engravings were large paintings done by European missionary artists employed at that time at the court in Beijing. These artists were Italian Jesuit Giuseppe Castiglione (1688–1766), French Jesuit ...

The “Battle Copper Prints” are a series of prints from copper engravings dating from the second half of the 18th century. They were commissioned by the Qianlong emperor of the Qing dynasty (1644–1911), who ruled from 1735 to 1796. They depict his military campaigns in China’s inner provinces and along the country’s frontiers. The master illustrations for the engravings were large paintings done by European missionary artists employed at that time at the court in Beijing. These artists were Italian Jesuit Giuseppe Castiglione (1688–1766), French Jesuit ...

The “Battle Copper Prints” are a series of prints from copper engravings dating from the second half of the 18th century. They were commissioned by the Qianlong emperor of the Qing dynasty (1644–1911), who ruled from 1735 to 1796. They depict his military campaigns in China’s inner provinces and along the country’s frontiers. The master illustrations for the engravings were large paintings done by European missionary artists employed at that time at the court in Beijing. These artists were Italian Jesuit Giuseppe Castiglione (1688–1766), French Jesuit ...

The “Battle Copper Prints” are a series of prints from copper engravings dating from the second half of the 18th century. They were commissioned by the Qianlong emperor of the Qing dynasty (1644–1911), who ruled from 1735 to 1796. They depict his military campaigns in China’s inner provinces and along the country’s frontiers. The master illustrations for the engravings were large paintings done by European missionary artists employed at that time at the court in Beijing. These artists were Italian Jesuit Giuseppe Castiglione (1688–1766), French Jesuit ...

The “Battle Copper Prints” are a series of prints from copper engravings dating from the second half of the 18th century. They were commissioned by the Qianlong emperor of the Qing dynasty (1644–1911), who ruled from 1735 to 1796. They depict his military campaigns in China’s inner provinces and along the country’s frontiers. The master illustrations for the engravings were large paintings done by European missionary artists employed at that time at the court in Beijing. These artists were Italian Jesuit Giuseppe Castiglione (1688–1766), French Jesuit ...

The “Battle Copper Prints” are a series of prints from copper engravings dating from the second half of the 18th century. They were commissioned by the Qianlong emperor of the Qing dynasty (1644–1911), who ruled from 1735 to 1796. They depict his military campaigns in China’s inner provinces and along the country’s frontiers. The master illustrations for the engravings were large paintings done by European missionary artists employed at that time at the court in Beijing. These artists were Italian Jesuit Giuseppe Castiglione (1688–1766), French Jesuit ...

The “Battle Copper Prints” are a series of prints from copper engravings dating from the second half of the 18th century. They were commissioned by the Qianlong emperor of the Qing dynasty (1644–1911), who ruled from 1735 to 1796. They depict his military campaigns in China’s inner provinces and along the country’s frontiers. The master illustrations for the engravings were large paintings done by European missionary artists employed at that time at the court in Beijing. These artists were Italian Jesuit Giuseppe Castiglione (1688–1766), French Jesuit ...

The “Battle Copper Prints” are a series of prints from copper engravings dating from the second half of the 18th century. They were commissioned by the Qianlong emperor of the Qing dynasty (1644–1911), who ruled from 1735 to 1796. They depict his military campaigns in China’s inner provinces and along the country’s frontiers. The master illustrations for the engravings were large paintings done by European missionary artists employed at that time at the court in Beijing. These artists were Italian Jesuit Giuseppe Castiglione (1688–1766), French Jesuit ...

The “Battle Copper Prints” are a series of prints from copper engravings dating from the second half of the 18th century. They were commissioned by the Qianlong emperor of the Qing dynasty (1644–1911), who ruled from 1735 to 1796. They depict his military campaigns in China’s inner provinces and along the country’s frontiers. The master illustrations for the engravings were large paintings done by European missionary artists employed at that time at the court in Beijing. These artists were Italian Jesuit Giuseppe Castiglione (1688–1766), French Jesuit ...

The “Battle Copper Prints” are a series of prints from copper engravings dating from the second half of the 18th century. They were commissioned by the Qianlong emperor of the Qing dynasty (1644–1911), who ruled from 1735 to 1796. They depict his military campaigns in China’s inner provinces and along the country’s frontiers. The master illustrations for the engravings were large paintings done by European missionary artists employed at that time at the court in Beijing. These artists were Italian Jesuit Giuseppe Castiglione (1688–1766), French Jesuit ...

The “Battle Copper Prints” are a series of prints from copper engravings dating from the second half of the 18th century. They were commissioned by the Qianlong emperor of the Qing dynasty (1644–1911), who ruled from 1735 to 1796. They depict his military campaigns in China’s inner provinces and along the country’s frontiers. The master illustrations for the engravings were large paintings done by European missionary artists employed at that time at the court in Beijing. These artists were Italian Jesuit Giuseppe Castiglione (1688–1766), French Jesuit ...

The “Battle Copper Prints” are a series of prints from copper engravings dating from the second half of the 18th century. They were commissioned by the Qianlong emperor of the Qing dynasty (1644–1911), who ruled from 1735 to 1796. They depict his military campaigns in China’s inner provinces and along the country’s frontiers. The master illustrations for the engravings were large paintings done by European missionary artists employed at that time at the court in Beijing. These artists were Italian Jesuit Giuseppe Castiglione (1688–1766), French Jesuit ...